The Great Railroad Strike of 1877, From Martinsburg to St. Louis

On Monday, July 16, 1877, firemen and brakemen on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad at Martinsburg, West Virginia, learned that their pay was being cut by ten percent, the second cut in less than a year. They did something small and local. They uncoupled the engines, ran them into the roundhouse and told the company that no freight would leave town until the cut was rescinded. Passenger trains and the mail could go through. The cattle cars could not. Martinsburg was a railroad town in a narrow valley, and a good share of the people who lived there either worked for the B&O or sold things to the people who did. When the mayor tried to arrest the leaders, a crowd made that impossible. Within two weeks the walkout that began in that valley had stopped trains from Baltimore to Chicago, burned a large part of the Pennsylvania Railroad's yards in Pittsburgh and turned St. Louis, for a few remarkable days, into a city run by a strike committee.

In short: The Great Railroad Strike of 1877 began over a wage cut in Martinsburg and became the first strike in American history to spread across the country. Governors and the president answered it with soldiers, about a hundred people died, and the fight over who would keep order in industrial disputes shaped labor law and the National Guard for decades.

A depression, a pay cut and a valley full of trains

To understand why a ten percent cut lit a fuse, start four years earlier. The Panic of 1873 began when the banking house of Jay Cooke and Company, overextended on railroad bonds, closed its doors in September of that year. What followed was one of the longest economic slumps in American history. Wages fell, and so did hours. Railroad men in particular lived with a grinding new arithmetic: the companies were cutting crews, running longer trains with the same number of hands and paying for the privilege of working only the days a train happened to run. A brakeman could spend his own money on a boarding house at the far end of a run while he waited, unpaid, for a train home.

The railroads were not poor. The B&O, under its president John W. Garrett, kept paying dividends to shareholders through the slump. To the men on the trains, that fact sat at the center of the dispute. The company said it was sharing hard times. The workers saw a company that had decided whose hard times counted.

There was also no system for handling the disagreement. No law required a railroad to bargain. The railroad brotherhoods that existed in 1877 were mostly mutual-aid and insurance societies for engineers and conductors, and the firemen and brakemen who walked out at Martinsburg had little in the way of a national organization behind them. When they stopped the trains they were not following a plan from a headquarters. They were improvising, and so was everyone who tried to stop them.

The governor, the militia and a telegram to Washington

West Virginia's governor, Henry M. Mathews, sent the state militia to Martinsburg. It did not go well for him. Many of the militiamen were railroad men themselves, or the neighbors and relatives of railroad men, and they were not eager to shoot at people they knew. A confrontation at the yards left a striker mortally wounded, and the militia largely melted away.

Mathews then did something that would be repeated by governor after governor over the next two weeks. He asked President Rutherford B. Hayes for federal troops, arguing that the state could not keep order on its own. Hayes was a few months into a presidency he owed to the deal that settled the disputed election of 1876, the bargain that ended federal military protection for Reconstruction governments in the South. The same spring that federal soldiers stepped back from guarding the rights of Black Southerners, the federal government found the will to send soldiers to guard railroad property. That contrast was not lost on observers at the time, and it is worth sitting with now.

Hayes issued a proclamation and sent regular army troops to Martinsburg. The trains began to move there under guard. By then it hardly mattered, because the strike had already jumped the tracks of the B&O and gone looking for company.

Baltimore, then Pittsburgh

On July 20, Maryland's governor called out the National Guard in Baltimore to keep strikers from blocking trains in Cumberland. As the Sixth Regiment marched from its armory to the train station, crowds jeered and threw stones. The soldiers fired. About ten people were killed in the streets of Baltimore that evening, most of them onlookers rather than railroad workers, and the station was set alight later that night.

The next day the violence moved to Pittsburgh, and it grew. The Pennsylvania Railroad, then one of the largest corporations in the world, had ordered what workers called "double-headers," trains pulled by two engines with crews cut to match. Men refused to run them. The local militia was reluctant to act against its own neighbors, so state authorities brought in militia from Philadelphia, a city that had its own grievances with Pittsburgh and none of its family ties. On July 21, at the Twenty-Eighth Street crossing, the Philadelphia troops fired into a crowd that included women and children. Around twenty people died.

Pittsburgh's response was fury. Crowds trapped the Philadelphia militia in a railroad roundhouse and set fire to cars around it. The soldiers fought their way out the next morning and retreated from the city. Over that night and the following day, a huge swath of the Pennsylvania Railroad's property burned: locomotives, more than a thousand cars, the Union Depot and the roundhouse itself. It was one of the most destructive single days of property loss in an American labor dispute, and it fixed an image in the minds of the country's owners that would last for a generation.

How a railroad strike became a general one

What made 1877 different from any earlier walkout was the way it traveled. The railroads were a single network, and the strike followed the network. Within days there were stoppages or crowds in Reading and Scranton, in Buffalo and Columbus, in Louisville and Chicago, and on lines across the Midwest.

In many places the strike stopped being only about railroad pay. Workers in other trades joined because they had their own cuts and their own grievances. In Chicago, crowds gathered in the streets and clashed with police and troops near the Halsted Street viaduct, where two days of fighting left dozens of people dead or wounded. In Reading, Pennsylvania, militia fired on a crowd and killed about ten people.

St. Louis is where the strike looked most like something new. There, the Workingmen's Party, a small socialist organization with a strong German-speaking membership, helped call a citywide general strike. Meetings drew thousands. An executive committee began issuing orders about which businesses could operate. Demands went well beyond railroad wages to an eight-hour day and a ban on child labor, ideas that sounded radical in 1877 and would be federal law within two lifetimes. For about a week the committee was, in practical terms, a rival authority in a major American city.

It did not last. The committee hesitated over what to do with the power it had, the city's business leaders organized armed citizens' patrols, and police and militia raided the strike headquarters at the end of July. The leaders were arrested and the strike collapsed. Across the country the pattern repeated: federal troops moved from city to city, trains resumed under guard, and by early August the Great Strike was over. The best estimates put the dead at around a hundred people.

The case the owners made, and the answer

It is worth stating fairly what the railroads and their defenders believed, because they believed it sincerely and it carried the day.

Their argument went like this. The country was in a depression. Revenue had fallen. A company that could not cut costs would fail, and a failed railroad employed no one. Property rights were the foundation of an orderly economy, and a crowd that burned a roundhouse was not a negotiation but a riot. The government's first duty was to keep the peace, and if local militias would not do it, someone had to. Many newspapers of the day described the strikers in the harshest terms, as a mob or worse.

The answer that workers gave in 1877, and that labor has refined ever since, is that "keeping order" without any lawful channel for a dispute is not neutrality. When a company can cut pay unilaterally, refuse to meet its workers and call the army when they stop work, the law is not standing between two parties. It is standing on one side. The violence in Baltimore and Pittsburgh began when soldiers fired on crowds; the burning followed the shooting. Nothing about that excuses arson, and the strikers' cause was not helped by it. But a system that offers workers no way to be heard short of stopping the trains should not be surprised when the trains stop.

President Hayes himself seemed to feel the force of this. In his diary that summer he wrote, in substance, that the strike had been put down by force, and then asked whether something could be done by education, by sensible restraint on the capitalists and by wiser general policy to end the underlying problem. He did not do much about it. But the question he asked in private is the one that labor law spent the next sixty years trying to answer.

What the strike left behind

The most visible legacy of 1877 is made of stone. In the years that followed, states and cities built large fortress-like armories, many of them with turrets and narrow windows, and reorganized their militias into a more disciplined National Guard. The lesson that owners and officials drew from Pittsburgh was that local soldiers with local loyalties could not be relied on, and that the state needed a force ready for industrial disorder. Some of those armories still stand, now converted into concert halls and community centers.

The second legacy is political. The Workingmen's Party grew briefly after the strike, and labor tickets won local races in a number of cities. The Knights of Labor, a secret society before 1877, grew into a mass organization in the following decade. Railroad men who had learned what it meant to fight a national company with local organizations began to imagine an industrial union that covered every worker on a line, an idea that would surface again in the Pullman strike of 1894, when federal troops and a federal court injunction were again used to break a national railroad stoppage.

The third legacy is the slow construction of rules. It took decades, but the federal government eventually moved from sending soldiers to building processes. The Railway Labor Act of 1926 set up mediation and bargaining for railroad workers, and the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 gave most private-sector workers a legal right to organize and strike and required employers to bargain. Those laws exist in large part because the country spent half a century learning, at great cost, what happens without them.

Why a 149-year-old strike still matters

Here is the argument for remembering 1877 as more than a historical curiosity. Every system of labor law answers one question: when workers and employers disagree, who decides, and how? In 1877 the answer was that employers decided, and the government enforced the decision with rifles. The labor laws of the 1920s and 1930s replaced that answer with a referee, a set of elections and a duty to bargain.

That referee matters most when it is weakest. When the federal labor board cannot act, when penalties for illegal firings are small enough to be a cost of doing business, when a company can stall a first contract for years, workers drift back toward the logic of 1877: the only leverage they have is stopping the work. The men in Martinsburg did not want a national crisis. They wanted the cut rescinded and a chance to be heard. Most strikes, then and now, start that way. Whether they end in a contract or in a roundhouse fire depends a great deal on whether the law gives people a better door to knock on.

It also matters who we picture when we think about the strike. The crowds of 1877 were railroad men, but also their wives and children, mill hands, teenagers, the unemployed and the curious. Most of the people killed by soldiers were not leaders of anything. They were people standing in streets near their homes. Remembering them is not a matter of romance. It is a matter of accuracy about what disorder looks like when the people who run a country decide that the answer to a wage dispute is a regiment.

What you can do

The Great Strike is a reminder that working people built today's labor protections through organization and politics, and that those protections need defending. A few ways to put the history to use:

• See where workers are organizing now. The labor page lists the newest union elections the National Labor Relations Board has counted, who won, and how union membership has changed over time. Look up the drives in your own state.
• Tell Congress what you think about labor law. Use find your representatives to get the phone numbers and contact forms for your House member, senators and state legislators, and check their latest votes before you call.
• Follow the wider fight. Our topic page on workers and unions gathers current reporting on strikes, contracts and labor policy, so you can keep up with the descendants of the Martinsburg walkout.
• Support a local workers' group. The organizations directory lists unions, worker centers and legal-aid groups by state. Many of them need volunteers who can help with translation, transportation or simply showing up at a picket.

If you live near one of the old armories, go look at it. Then think about the people it was built to keep in line, and the long work of building a country where nobody needs one for that purpose.